


The time it takes for the world to go dark

by slamjam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: also mom dies, i mean its supposed to be sad, its sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 17:51:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1992171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slamjam/pseuds/slamjam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it takes longer to go grimdark than you'd think, certainly longer than the time it takes to have one's heart broken</p>
            </blockquote>





	The time it takes for the world to go dark

**Author's Note:**

> first off i'd like to apologise

At first there was something, she was something. Looking back, what else could she have done, but at the time it was always a choice, she had just chosen to take the leap into danger, fashioning herself a hero. A child, playing an adult, waving around loaded guns like toys, stupidly on the edge of murder and oblivion. Of course it was she was going to get hurt, she knew nothing of death. But things are never so black and white as this. 

Rose knew what death was like. Rose had known from a very early age what death looked like. When her mother “self medicated” herself in and out of stupors, reeling and stumbling over what looked like a glass of water with an olive in it, that was a type of death. Once when Rose was very young and her mother was full of liquor and sleeping, she had taken her mother’s (empty) glass and made a tap water martini that tasted terrible, and when her mother awoke to the sight of her crying into a half full glass she grabbed Rose and cradled her and cried too. She learned that death did not always come from the outside. Some people were their own death sentences.

When Rose is overtaken by the dark she knows what it means. As soon as she knows, she is overtaken. Blackness is scary. Rose is no longer Rose. She is a consciousness inside a void. She is nothing in the midst of a great Something Else, and she is more alone than she’s ever been in her entire life. She cries like she did when she was little, but unlike when she was little, no one was there to console her. Her mother is dead, her mother, the drunk bastard who barely raised her, who she played elaborate mind games with, and worked so hard to avoid was dead. Her mother was quite often terrible at her job but Rose was the moon orbiting her sun, the smell of liquor on her breath be damned. It was hard for a little girl in the middle of nowhere, Rose had nearly no friends her own age, so it was always her and her mother and the woods howling bloody murder around them. Sometimes at night, when a certain animal would prowl too close she’d hear a pop and then in the morning there’s be a red river sunbathing into nothingness, but no body. She remembered the pictures, how her mother had been stained with not just… blood but also red wine and how fitting it was. This time there is a body. 

Rose sobs and the noise rings through the void like screaming in an empty house. To lose one’s mother is a dreadful thing, and she vaguely thinks through her clouded mind that she is being given more time to think about, no grieve her dead mother than any of her other friends, but then fuck that. She is rose and they are them and this is now. Time is no longer a useful measure, nothing exists but her and she is screaming into nothing, and it could go on forever and it feels like it does. Then there is something else besides her and she is interrupted. Things are feeding into her consciousness, past the curtain of emotions currently hung around her. Ancient information, things long forgotten, but held by the universe. She knows, everything she ever imagined and more, the universe floats through her mind and she is glad that she no longer has corporeal form because she is sure that she would combust if she felt this much with her old body around her, holding her taut and rigid. She is so much more now, so much more than before, she knows now. She wonders if this means that she is dead, and this is the afterlife, maybe she is becoming part of the black sky she saw at night back on earth, maybe she could see her mother again. And she almost lets go.

But something pulls her back from the edge. She is angry. It starts off small, but by the time her cries are down to hiccups she is livid. She is going to kill Jack, she is going to kill the bastard that made her feel so small. She was still in shock when she was talking to Jade, but now she knows. She wants to kill the thing that killed her mother, she wants to see the red wine on the floor. Close around she feels beings, horrorterrors, the walls of the universe personified, wrap around her and she feels oddly safe. These beings hold Rose, they speak in their whispery language like crude oil on her soul, and they fuel her being. They are more than she is, she can feel it, they are the reason she is now. She feels vaguely as though she should be postulating, but there is no floor in her mind. She knows she can stay here in this gap forever if she wishes. The horrorterrors have chosen her, they want what she wants, and if that is to stay forever suspended they would oblige, but what she wants more than anything is to get revenge. And so she left the horrorterrors in the lurch and returned to seek selfish justice, which really isn’t justice at all. It is revenge. 

She knew she would get hurt. She knew the darkness and the ash of her skin spelled the end for her yet she didn’t stop, she didn’t cease. Maybe she wanted to see how far she could go. One fact remains, this isn’t the last time Rose Lalonde dies.

**Author's Note:**

> also this was my first fic. like ever. so there's that


End file.
